Inspiration for ITV’s tower lies just downriver

Twelve months ago this week, ITV paid £56 million for a 22-storey tower and studios built 40 years ago for London Weekend Television on a 2.5-acre site on the South Bank, near Waterloo Bridge.

The broadcaster has now started to think seriously about how to redevelop the site.

How difficult can this be? All ITV executives have to do is gaze yards downstream to see what developer CIT is doing at King’s Reach Tower. Eleven floors are being added to the 31-storey block built in the Seventies for IPC magazines. The extended tower is being filled with 191 flats.

The tower’s very similar podium levels are being greatly enlarged to hold more than 400,000 square feet of commercial space.

Expect ITV to reach the inevitable conclusion that the LWT tower will be raised to as high as the foundations can cope and be turned into flats — an act that will more than pay for enlarging the podium to hold offices and lots of nice studios with a good TV view. Easy really.

A bit of a stink over northern line plan

A shadow is being cast over the £1 billion Northern line extension from Kennington to Battersea.

The Malaysian owners of Battersea Power Station are warning they may not be able to make a promised £200 million payment towards the project. SP Setia and Sime Darby say plans for a nearby construction site to be used to help build London’s £4 billion super-sewer threaten the viability of the offices element of their project.

Lawyers for the companies have written to planning inspectors, warning “noise, odour and traffic” will make their adjacent offices development “unlettable, thus compromising the deliverability of the power station and the funding of the Northern line extension.”

The temporary encampment is to be wedged between power station land and Berkeley Group’s Riverlight scheme. The site will be needed for six years. From there, giant tunnel-boring machines will set forth. Thames Water this month lodged applications for temporary sites up and down the river, including one beside MI6 on Albert Embankment.

Close to 40 million tonnes of untreated sewage flushes into the Thames in a typical year — enough to fill the Royal Albert Hall 450 times, if you can bear the thought. That might also have occurred to SP Setia and Sime Darby, who will of course eventually be adding to the load.